Ghost stories from India

The Cotton Bales’ Secret

In the industrial outskirts of Karur, where dust hung in the air like a permanent shroud, stood a two-story warehouse for textile exports. The upper floor housed the offices, a...

Read Story →

The Curve of the Red Earth

Dr. Meera Khanna was not a woman given to fancies. As the medical officer at the remote village of Barwani, nestled in the folds of the Satpura range, she had...

Read Story →

The Ledger of the Unquiet

My sister, Claire, has always lived with one foot in another world. She calls it a burden, a flicker of sight that sometimes lets her sense what’s hidden. I used...

Read Story →

The Floor Remembers

I never believed in the paranormal. Not really. I devoured ghost stories and horror films, but it was all entertainment, a thrill of the imagined. So when odd things happened,...

Read Story →

The Rain-Slicked Wall

The rain had been falling for hours, turning the streets of Chandrapur into a labyrinth of puddles and mud. I was pedaling home from my evening classes, my glasses fogged...

Read Story →

The Final Bell

It was the last day of the autumn term, and the school had declared a surprise half-holiday after the inter-house sports meet. The corridors echoed with the thud of running...

Read Story →

The Jingle of Anklets

In the dusty outskirts of Jaipur, where the Aravalli hills cast long shadows at dusk, our family of four settled into a modest flat on the third floor of an...

Read Story →

The Keeper of the Gate

Last year, I was preparing for my medical entrance exams, which meant that every spare minute was consumed by textbooks and mock tests. My days were a blur of lectures...

Read Story →

The Gallows Grove

I am Nisha, and like many from my country, I have always been drawn to tales of the supernatural. But the stories I grew up with were not mere entertainment;...

Read Story →

The Tin Ceiling

The flat we borrowed in Jaipur was a stale box of heat and dust, a fourth-floor walk-up that managed to feel both cramped and hollow. My uncle’s death had pulled...

Read Story →

The Last House on Birch Lane

It was the summer of 1994 when my family moved into the house on Birch Lane. The place had been empty for years, and the realtor was eager to get...

Read Story →

The Dry Whisper of the Well

My name is Elias, and I am the youngest of three, with two older brothers, Marcus and Paul. Paul, the eldest, still lived with our parents in the old farmhouse,...

Read Story →

The Lantern Keeper’s Crossroads

In the winter of 2014, we—my husband Arjun, our three-year-old daughter Meera, and I—were visiting my ancestral village in the hills of Himachal Pradesh. On the eve of the new...

Read Story →

The Ceiling Grate

My name is Arjun, and I grew up in a dusty village in Rajasthan, where old women told tales of djinns and restless spirits over dying embers. I was always...

Read Story →

The Brass Vessel

I have always prided myself on logic. Numbers, equations, the immutable laws of physics—these were my gods. So when my family moved into that sprawling, ivy-choked Victorian on the outskirts...

Read Story →

The Ticking of the Hall Clock

A year has passed since that night, yet the memory of it still wakes me in a cold sweat. My name is Elara, and I live alone in a creaking...

Read Story →

The Tenant of Ash Lane

In the autumn of 2019, I moved to the town of Bellamy Falls for a job at the local paper mill. The town was nestled in a valley, surrounded by...

Read Story →

The Blue Saree

I was sixteen, spending my summer break at my aunt’s farmhouse in the remote village of Chandipur. The place was a labyrinth of rustling paddy fields and abandoned wells, where...

Read Story →

The Glass Marble

In the autumn of my seventeenth year, I lived in a crumbling boarding house perched on the edge of a fog-choked valley. The house was a relic of a bygone...

Read Story →

The Pecan Grove Vigil

I am Elara, nineteen, and until last autumn, I believed the dead stayed buried. My family—my father, a retired accountant; my mother, a schoolteacher; and my brother in Mumbai—are all...

Read Story →

The Broken Payphone

In the sweltering July of 2009, I was twenty and home for the summer, staying in my parents’ cramped second-floor apartment above a 24-hour laundromat. The window of my bedroom...

Read Story →

The Hollow Hearth

After weeks of relentless phone calls and a desperate, cross-country drive, Elena finally stood on the cracked porch of the house where her husband, Marcus, had been living with his...

Read Story →

The Empty Ground Floor

I grew up in a small town where the biggest mystery wasn’t the old fort on the hill, but a single ground floor in an apartment building next to my...

Read Story →

The Warmth That Left

I grew up in a house that always smelled of rain and wet fur, where the floorboards creaked in a rhythm I thought was just the house settling. But I...

Read Story →